PG-13 | 1 h 36 min | Drama, Biopic | 2018
Tami Oldham Ashcraft, who was alone and adrift in a hurricane-hammered 44-foot yacht in the Pacific for 41 days, is often asked how that ordeal transformed her. Profoundly, Tami says. It compelled her to appreciate life, to live in the present, and be less self-absorbed. Above all, it taught her to be happy by being involved with her children, grateful for her family and prioritizing what matters over what’s trivial.
She wasn’t always this way.
Icelandic director Baltasar Kormakur’s “Adrift” tells the true story of 23-year-old Tami (Shailene Woodley) and her fiancé, Richard (Sam Claflin) caught in 1983’s Hurricane Raymond, not to be confused with similarly named storms in 1989, and later in the 21st century.
First, the couple are on what seems an exciting 4,000-mile trip from Tahiti to San Diego. But after a while, mid-ocean, 40-foot-high waves and 145-knot winds strike, washing Richard overboard. Tami’s forced to redirect and set the battered yacht on a grueling 1,500-mile trip to Hawaii instead, while trying to find Richard.
Kormakur’s film draws on Tami’s book, “Red Sky in Mourning: A True Story of Love, Loss and Survival at Sea.” His spectacular cinematography, sound and sound engineering will make you feel the water’s wetness, the vastness of the waves, the immensity of the ocean; you may catch yourself wiping imaginary spray off your face.
Kormakur portrays Tami as a self-obsessed San Diego girl traveling the world, partly to develop independence, and partly to prove it to herself. How? By living away from her family.
But her fantasy of independence proves illusory. She has to rely on others at every turn, whether it’s floating a fleeting business with a girlfriend, or sailing. It’s usually someone else who builds the boats (Richard built his own), someone else who teaches her to sail better, to use only the sun and stars to navigate. It’s someone else, who through their journey (as Richard does here), makes hers more fulfilling.
Screenwriters Aaron and Jordan Kandell drive this home subtly, intermingling Tami’s scenes with Richard offshore, with flashback scenes of their brief courtship onshore. The Kandells also flesh out a contradiction. Bent on living for herself, Tami’s decision to sail with Richard in life, not just on the ocean, implies that she’s already going beyond herself, finding fulfillment in someone else’s joy.
Tami realizes that, when everything seems lost, it helps to ask if it’s really “everything.”
After Hurricane Raymond has put the yacht through the wringer, the damage is devastating: snapped masts, drenched sails, waterlogged cabin, wrecked engine, ruined radio, and electronic navigation. The gash on her head gapes, her limbs ache, she’s fatigued beyond words, Richard’s disappeared and she’s on a course too far from shipping lanes to be readily rescued. Besides, she’s feeling everything he said he feels, when alone at sea: sunburnt, sleep-deprived, seasick, hungry, wet.
Miraculously, she finds more than she believes she’s lost.
She finds consciousness, after being knocked out for hours. She finds that the boat’s not sunk, after being repeatedly flipped over. She finds food and drink stashed away. She finds that she, a vegetarian, is willing to eat seafood to survive; not all life is equal, after all. She finds a sextant that helps her steer. She finds gear to pump out water. She finds flares. And the resourcefulness she thought she lacked.
She learns to adapt, instead of being rigid. She learns that values aren’t absolute but have hierarchies; a crisis can be a blessing if it helps sift the important from the inconsequential. A boat, after all, can be a metaphor for life. Before setting out, you’re forced to decide what you must carry and what you must leave behind.
Woodley, who learned sailing for this role and co-produced the film, is in awe of the real-life Tami, someone who actively chooses to live every moment. In interviews Woodley adds, “through this movie … witnessing what she went through, it’s taught me to be a lot stronger.”
The real-life Tami has admitted how a disaster forces you to wonder if you’ve completed all that you set out for yourself in life, and how you wish you had more time. She has talked of how disaster forces you to vow that, if only you survive, you’ll never do this or that again: “You’re just making promises to the universe. It’s very humbling, and it really puts you in your place.”
